Of all the athletes Adam Bleakney has coached over the years at the University of Illinois, Paralympian Aaron Pike stands out.

“Aaron, of all the athletes I’ve coached, he’s certainly the most gifted in terms of pure athletic skill,” said Bleakney, the head wheelchair track coach at Illinois.

Bleakney recalls that Pike, whom he met in 2007, can throw a football half the distance of the field from a sitting position. In wheelchair racing, Pike is among the athletes Bleakney has coached in marathoning.

Pike played basketball and raced on the wheelchair track team at Illinois, which has become the premier training site for U.S. Paralympians in track and field. He joins sled hockey forward Travis Dodson as the two former Illinois athletes representing the United States in Pyeongchang, where the Paralympics begin Friday.

A four-time Paralympian, Pike competed in his first Summer Games in London, where he finished 16th in the marathon.

By the time Pike started splitting his time between summer and winter sports, he already had eight years of high-level training to gain the bio-mechanic efficiency it takes to become an elite wheelchair racer, Bleakney said. That training makes it easier for Pike to transition to racing when the ski season ends.

Cross-country skiing and biathlon, which combines skiing and shooting a rifle, provide a different type of challenge. After the London Games in 2012, Pike was invited to try skiing.

“Skiing, the first year it was just getting my feet wet. I was just getting crushed out there,” Pike, who is from Park Rapids, Minn., said last fall at the U.S. Olympic Committee’s media summit. “I was just learning tons every single race. I would say it took the first two years of skiing, really of getting my butt kicked. The third and this year I should say of skiing, it’s coming more and more together, especially in the sprint for me.”

To see it all come together at the Pyeongchang Paralympics would be the goal for Pike, who is competing in his second Winter Games. In Sochi, his best result was 12th in the cross-country distance race.

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Before training in biathlon, Pike says he was an above average shooter.

“In the beginning it was really hard,” Pike, 31, said of taking up biathlon. “You’ve got to bring your heart rate down a little bit when you’re approaching the range. Get yourself out of race mode, usually you’re putting the foot down on the throttle and you’re keeping it there. Changing that up and bringing your heart rate down, switch gears to being a shooter instead of a ski racer that was all new to me.”

In the last year, Pike says something clicked with his shooting and he’s been improving. At last year’s world championships in Germany, he finished just off the podium, in fourth place, in the 15K in biathlon.

His training as a marathoner — he's raced Boston, Chicago and New York — has given him a strong fitness base that translates to skiing.

“It takes us about an hour and a half to do a marathon and the longest ski race is under an hour so I had the endurance,” he said.

Pike, who suffered a T-11 spinal cord injury during a hunting accident when he was 13, often trains alongside his girlfriend, Paralympian Oksana Masters, who will also compete in biathlon and cross-country skiing at the Games. The two have been based in Bozeman, Mont., in the months leading up to the Paralympics.

They started out skiing at about the same time after returning from London — they hadn’t met at those Games. They were friends before they started dating about four years ago.

“It was kind of cool to have teammates on the team who were also experiencing the sport for the first time, going through that process,” Masters said. “We bonded over that. He loves coffee as much as I do and that just solidified everything basically.”

The men and women compete at the same World Cups throughout the season and train together outside of competition. Pike says he and Masters both enjoy where cross-country skiing leads them, into the mountains and woods.

“He literally pushes me outside my comfort zone,” Masters said of training with Pike. “Half the time I’m just chasing him so I don’t get lost. I’m terrified of getting lost on snow somewhere.”

In the practical sense, having a significant other on the team allows them to see more of each other. But it also provides an extra layer of support, they both say.

“Each of us knows what it’s like to have a bad race so we can relate to each other that way,” Pike said. “We both know what it’s like to celebrate an awesome performance too. It’s a really cool unique thing that we can both walk into opening ceremonies together actually. I don’t know how many couples who can say that they can walk in together at opening ceremonies.”